No Nukes

Twenty years ago in a small town in Ukraine there was a big nuclear explosion.

In 1986 i lived in Moscow. A few months before the explosion i was with my family in Ukraine, in a town called Ostior (i hope it’s the right spelling), which is quite close to Chernobyl. When my parents heard about the explosion, they were rather panicky – they know a couple of things about physics and my father worked in power plants (non-nuclear) all his life. (He also served in Chernobyl as a soldier of the Soviet Army.)

I was only 6 years old, but i liked listening to the news, even though it was 60% about the imperialist armament race (гонка вооружений) and 40% about the great crops of wheat and cotton (перевыполненый план по сборке урожая, и т.д.). A few days later when people started talking openly about the terrible consequences i started connecting things and told my mom:

— “Mama, now the Americans must be really laughing at the USSR – our Soviet government is fighting against nuclear weapons all the time and now we have done a bad nuclear explosion ourselves, didn’t we? Did i get it right?”